Life Without Petroleum Essays

Occidental Petroleum is running a very clever and funny ad supporting and informing about what petroleum is used for as well as natural gas, gasoline and diesel.

As you’ve seen in the video below lots of things will disappear. They even missed important stuff like the concrete foundation of the house, the asphalt roadway and the elastic holding up the boxer shorts. It could have been funnier if you tolerate crudeness with a smile.

But seriously, life as its known in the developed world would stop. No gas for the car, no diesel to bring food into the city, no jet fuel for travel and mail, no natural gas or heating oil for warm homes and California will be dark. 300 million people won’t be supportable.

275 million will be left out of the food chain. Do you think they won’t be looking for answers? Would a gulf oil drilling moratorium get food close enough for meal? The idiocy at high levels of government is astonishing. Foolishness knows no limit in today’s media saturated silly society.

That said, oil coming up way short would have tens of millions looking for how the political elites blew the modern world apart. It might be a very good idea to be, well armed, really. Folks are going to be hungry and angry. At desperate – lives will be lost. Those with – will be attacked by those without.

It might be very self interested (self preserving) to be “pro oil”. For many reasons beyond just jobs, profits, taxes and cheap energy, petroleum is crucial. Start taking it away such that it become too dear the danger would be intense for everyone.

Reading, watching or listening to news or pundits that don’t concern themselves with adequate affordable supplies for everyone is setting up ignorance pointing to risk.

For this writer adequate petroleum supplies is crucial – it will take decades for the alternatives to supplant and replace fossil oil and gas. Moreover, the economy has to be robust enough for the consumers and producers to buy conservation, efficiency and alternative work devices. This is going to take a long time.

Screwing it up along the way is senseless and essentially a betrayal.

Thanks to Occidental. The lighthearted ad just touches, but leaves no scars, suggesting a warning. A real petroleum shortage will leave scars – from the bloody wounds, too.

By Brian Westenhaus of NewEnergyandFuel.com

Source: Laugh Until It Sinks In

Back to homepage

The US government announces the takeover of three of the biggest car manufacturers in the country. They intend to concentrate on producing electric trucks to help supplement the much needed food deliveries. Across the vast agricultural lands of the Earth, farmers take inspiration from Brazil and start planting sugar cane to speed up the production of ethanol.

However, in big cities across the US and indeed the rest of the world, food terminals begin to close, resulting in a fast spreading famine. People form crushing queues at train stations waiting for food deliveries. Instead of fresh produce, they must make do with powdered milk and rice. The essential services such as coal delivery and emergencies are still operational; surviving on the ever dwindling oil reserves, everything else is at a standstill. The US continues to dramatically reduce its oil consumption in order to stretch out the vital remaining reserves. But in just a few short months, there won’t be enough oil for any food deliveries at all.

While food continues to be brought in, rubbish/garbage is no longer collected and taken away. In fact, any rubbish clear up is a luxury afforded only to a few lucky people. The situation sounds bad in the North, but things are even worse in Saudi Arabia, which is in the midst of an economic disaster. 90 per cent of their income from exports came from oil, with all that gone the country collapses into ruin. Japan was one of the biggest importers in the world; roughly 60 per cent of all its nutritional needs came from overseas. With no ships docking at their ports, the entire population face starvation.

Back in the US, many people are no longer prepared to wait for the government to find a solution. Instead they take matters into their own hands and start converting garages and basements into makeshift laboratories, where they conduct experiments in producing their own bio fuel using scavenged chemicals such as methanol. This is a very dangerous experiment, but if it works it could provide escape from starving cities. However, this ingenuity only works on diesel cars and for a limited time.

Other alternative fuel sources also face similar hurdles; while the soya bean harvest was more than the double what it was in the previous year, it only produced half a billion gallons of bio fuel which is less than 1 per cent of the diesel North America used each year prior to the crisis. Furthermore, no more can be produced until the next harvest. Farmers continue to valiantly plant more corn to gain a higher yield of ethanol.

A world without oil forces governments around the world to make tough and brutal decisions. In this case, should they tell the farmers to plant crops for food or fuel? Hospitals are rapidly running out of supplies; everything from rubber gloves, gowns, medicine and lubricants all need oil in their manufacture. Without such necessaries, drug resistant infections become rampant. In the big cities, families are surviving literally by the skin of their teeth. But now matters take a turn for the worst. An electrical transformer fire which was mostly nothing more than a nuisance in a world with oil, becomes nightmarish. Abandoned vehicles block access, preventing emergency vehicles from dealing with the problem. The fire quickly spreads, before an explosion rocks the neighbourhood.

Winter has arrived in the northern hemisphere, and for the millions of people living in northern cities, the time has come to make a tough decision. Do they lie low and wait for winter to pass? Or do they flee south. For many, there is no decision, as temperatures plummet, people flee en masse, heading south; in what is the biggest mass migration in human history. In the US people from the north pour into the southern states and Mexico. While in Europe, people from Scandinavia, the Baltic, Russia and Britain pour into southern France and the Mediterranean countries. The refugees travel on foot; cars are abandoned, including the ones that were revived by cooking oil. The cold has turned the fuel thick and sludgy; consequently the fuel lines and engines have become blocked, rendering the cars totally useless. The northern cities transform into eerie ghostly islands poking out of the snow and ice. Amazingly, not all people flee south, some hardy travellers’ venture north seeking out isolated cabins in the wilderness where they can sit out the winter living off a stockpile of food that they bought with them. However, the stockpile is limited to basically what they can carry on their backs. So they have to resort to hunting and trapping animals. On average, an adult male human needs around 210,000 calories to see him through a winter, thus the regular acquisition of fresh meat is a necessity for survival.